The exercise of insider power is frequently considered as a major cause of involuntary unemployment. The authors show that under standard assumptions--insiders are selfish and they need not fear the loss of their job--insider power does not cause unemployment but leads to the introduction of a...

The endowment effect describes the fact that people demand much more to give up an object than they are willing to spend to acquire it. The existence of this effect has been documented in numerous experiments. We attempt to explain this effect by showing that evolution favors individuals whose...

In this paper, the authors report the results of a series of efficiency wage experiments. Some of the key predictions of the efficiency wage hypothesis are qualitatively confirmed by the data: higher wages caused a reduction in shirking; firms offered contracts which exhibited positive job...

We study competition among market designers who create new trading platforms, when boundedly rational traders learn to select among them. We ask whether 'Walrasian' platforms, leading to market-clearing trading outcomes, will dominate the market in the long run. If several market designers...

We justify the application to extensive games of a model of deductive reasoning based on three key features: 'caution', 'full belief of opponent rationality', and 'no extraneous restrictions on beliefs'. We apply the model to several examples, and show that it yields novel economic insights. The...

We examine the impact of social rewards in an unemployment insurance context. A social norm requires effort in proportion to perceived talent, but individuals cunningly choose effort so as to manipulate the perception of their talent. The model predicts that low talented individuals increase...